Balancing Regionalism and Localism: How Institutions and Incentives Shape American Transportation Policy

Public policy decisions are increasingly made by regional governance efforts that involve diverse decision makers from multiple government units within a geographic region. These decision-making bodies face competing pressures to represent regional and local interests. We study how decision makers balance preferences for regionalism and localism within metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), the policymaking entities that are responsible for implementing U.S. federal surface transportation policy at the regional level. Our model of regional governance relates variation in regional policy outcomes to the incentives of MPO decision makers and the institutional environments in which they interact. Analyzing data from a sample of the nation's largest metropolitan areas, we find that MPOs dominated by elected officials produce more locally focused policies, holding other factors constant, while MPOs dominated by nonelected public managers produce more regionally oriented policies. Contextual factors, as well as the regional governance institutions themselves, further shape the balance between regionalism and localism.     

Policy Deliberation as a Goal: The Case of Chinese ENGO Activism

Since it was first introduced in the late 1990s, the concept of deliberative democracy has had policy appeal for both Chinese policymakers and scholars. The Chinese government has recently introduced various deliberative institutions in a top-down manner to address diverse governance challenges. Deliberation at the level of civil society, however, has remained largely limited under the Chinese authoritarian regime setting. This paper illustrates how Chinese civil society actors have increasingly exerted bottom-up pressure to attain a greater degree of deliberation, transparency, and accountability in policymaking, by using the case of a series of anti-dam campaigns conducted by environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) over the past decade. Throughout their campaigns, ENGOs have urged both the central and local governments to adopt more participatory and transparent policymaking and examine the potential social and environmental impacts of large dams. They have done so particularly by invoking the very laws and policies that the government has recently introduced. This study suggests that future research on deliberative democracy in China should pay greater attention to non-state actors and their roles in practicing and promoting bottom-up deliberation.     

Purchasing Policy Advice: The Limits to Contracting Out

Throughout the OECD, governments have been contracting out an increasing range of goods and services. Against this background, this article outlines the case for, and assesses the merits of, placing the purchase of governmental policy advice on a more competitive basis. Two options are given particular attention: first, the creation of an internal market for policy advice within the public sector under which departments and other government agencies would tender to supply specific policy outputs; and second, a more radical option under which public and private sector organizations would compete for the contracts to supply governmental policy advice. Drawing on the insights of the new institutional economics, it is argued that neither option is likely to enhance the efficiency or effectiveness with which policy advice is produced, whether under conditions of short-term or long-term contracting. This is due to the likelihood of: only partial contestability (due, among other things, to asset specificity in the form of transaction-specific expertise and trust); a greater risk of opportunistic behavior by the suppliers of advice (and also, under some conditions, by the purchasers); higher agency costs and transaction costs; and greater problems with respect to horizontal and vertical policy coordination. Such considerations suggest that the widespread reliance of governments on relatively permanent advisory institutions and in-house expertise can be explained and justified on the same theoretical grounds that have prompted the contracting out of other publicly-funded goods and services.     

Europeanisation of a Non-EU Country: The Case of Swiss Immigration Policy

Although studies of the influence of Europeanisation on domestic politics and institutions are numerous, a consistent and systematic analytical framework is still lacking. This article tries to overcome this weakness and presents a comprehensive framework that examines the conditions under which Europeanisation is likely to lead to national adaptation. We identify three main independent variables, including domestic power configurations, mediating domestic institutions, and actors' strategies. This model is applied to the agreement on the free movement of persons between Switzerland and the European Union. Our results suggest that it is not the number of veto points as such that matters most, but the strength of the actors that activate them or threaten to do so, and the counter-strategies available to actors favouring change.     

Talking the Talk: Immigration Policy Since 1962

Immigration policy has repeatedly failed to fulfil the ambitions of its advocates. Successive governments have neither willed the means nor been open about the obstacles in their way to restricting immigration. Disappointing results have contributed to disillusionment with the political system and help to create the ground on which UKIP has prospered.     

The Limits and Opportunities of Networks: Municipalities and Canadian Climate Change Policy

Research on climate change policy and politics has become increasingly focused on the actions and influence of subnational governments. In North America, this attention has been particularly focused on why subnational governments have taken action in the absence of national leadership, what effect action might have on future national climate policy, and whether the collective action of networks of municipal governments are reshaping and challenging the character of national and global climate governance. This paper examines Canadian municipal climate in light of the absence of a comprehensive and effective climate national strategy. The paper considers various reasons why local governments in Canada have not been central players in national plans, and why their actions have not been more influential nationally. The paper argues that the potential influence of Canadian municipalities on national climate policy is weak, given the loose nature of the network and the long-held structural view that municipalities are not significant units of political analysis in national political and policy debates. The paper concludes by considering the constraints and opportunities of subnational climate networks and municipal network analysis.     

Immigration and Refugees: Punctuations in the Commonwealth Policy Agenda

In April 2013, Australia's population reached 23 million. Up to 60 percent of population growth in Australia comes from immigration and 40 percent of population growth comes from natural increase. It is therefore not too surprising that the issue of immigration receives a considerable amount of attention in the overall Commonwealth policy agenda. However, immigration policy is a complex policy area that is vulnerable to sudden increases in policy attention. Such increases in policy attention may be related to external shocks, wars or changing global economic conditions. This article charts some of the contextual factors, which result in high‐salience punctuations and intense policy activity in the area of immigration.     

The Hidden American Immigration Consensus: A Conjoint Analysis of Attitudes toward Immigrants

Many studies have examined Americans' immigration attitudes. Yet prior research frequently confounds multiple questions, including which immigrants to admit and how many to admit. To isolate attitudes on the former question, we use a conjoint experiment that simultaneously tests the influence of nine immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Drawing on a two‐wave, population‐based survey, we demonstrate that Americans view educated immigrants in high‐status jobs favorably, whereas they view those who lack plans to work, entered without authorization, are Iraqi, or do not speak English unfavorably. Strikingly, Americans' preferences vary little with their own education, partisanship, labor market position, ethnocentrism, or other attributes. Beneath partisan divisions over immigration lies a broad consensus about who should be admitted to the country. The results are consistent with norms‐based and sociotropic explanations of immigration attitudes. This consensus points to limits in both theories emphasizing economic and cultural threats, and sheds new light on an ongoing policy debate.     

Explicit Evidence on the Import of Implicit Attitudes: The IAT and Immigration Policy Judgments

The implicit association test (IAT) is increasingly used to detect automatic attitudes. Yet a fundamental question remains about this measure: How well can it predict individual judgments? Though studies find that IAT scores shape individual evaluations, these inquiries do not account for an array of well-validated, theoretically relevant variables, thus raising the challenge of omitted variable bias. For scholars using the IAT, the risk here is one of misattributing to implicit attitudes what can be better explained by alternate and rigorous self-reports of explicit constructs. This paper examines the IAT’s performance in the context of U.S. immigration politics. Using a representative web survey of adults, I demonstrate the IAT effectively captures implicit attitude toward Latino immigrants. Critically, I then show these attitudes substantively mold individual preferences for illegal and legal immigration policy, net of political ideology, socio-economic concerns, and well-established measures of intolerance toward immigrants, such as authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. Combined, these results suggest the IAT measures attitudes that are non-redundant and potent predictors of individual political judgments.     

Immigration Policy and Hispanic Representation in National Elections

For the first time in U.S. history, after decades of unprecedented growth in interior immigration enforcement disproportionately impacting Latinos, ten percent of the U.S. House of Representatives is Hispanic. Using congressional district-level data on all candidates participating in general elections to the U.S. House of Representatives between 2008 and 2018, we show that intensified immigration enforcement suppressed Hispanics’ representation in congressional elections. The effect—nonexistent for other minorities, such as non-Hispanic Black candidates, as well as in primary elections—is driven by local police-based measures and diminished electoral support. Furthermore, it appears more harmful during midterm elections and in localities without a sanctuary policy.     

Day Laborers and Dock Workers: Casual Labor Markets and Immigration Policy

The situations of nineteenth century dock workers and today’s immigrant day laborers bear striking similarities and challenges, especially for those seeking to organize them into labor unions. The obstacles confronting such organizing efforts also underscore the legitimate concerns many Americans have about the threats to social order posed by immigrants today.

The Death Penalty and the Peculiarity of American Political Institutions

This article examines distinctive American political institutions that contribute to explaining the continued use of the death penalty. In the light of wide popular support for capital punishment, strong political leadership is considered to be a principal channel for the abolition of capital punishment. The dilemma of the US death penalty, however, lies in populist features of political structures that greatly limit the political leverage and possibilities available to leaders. The institutional arrangements in the United States allow public support for the death penalty to influence political decision making more directly than it can in the European counterpart. A strong receptiveness of US political leaders to the public also implies that once public opinion changes, political leaders are likely to respond to the public’s new attitude. Unlike most countries, which abolished the death penalty through political initiatives that were counter-majoritarian, the United States may abolish it only after a change in public opinion.

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The Role of Assessments and Institutions for Policy Learning: A Study on Swedish Climate and Nuclear Policy Formation

This study examines two challenges related to the integration of environmental concerns into public policymaking: how to shape institutions that facilitate policy learning in national policymaking processes, and how to create effective supporting assessment processes. A simple construct of policy learning is applied empirically; distinguishing what is learned in terms of conceptual and technical learning, and unpacking the process of learning into three elements: knowledge acquisition, interpretation, and institutionalization. Two empirical policy cases, climate and nuclear policy formation in Sweden, are analyzed over two decades, detecting patterns of learning and investigating what institutions have facilitated or obstructed them. The analysis is based on a study of actual policy outputs, an examination of reasoning and argumentation in policy documents, and evidence from testimonial interviews. Results indicate that climate policy has undergone fundamental learning processes whereas nuclear policy has been more intractable. Most learning has occurred in some agency and committee processes, while ministries and political levels have suffered from weak capacities and incentives to learn. Key drivers of learning included trust building among key agents coupled to international driving forces. Ultimately, institutional rules, capacities, and incentives are more important factors for enhancing learning than what types of assessments feed in.     

Immigration Policy and the “Crisis of British Values”

It is widely believed that there is a lack of common values in contemporary Britain. One influential explanation is that immigration has created an ethnically “diverse” society with a multiplicity of values that have displaced the common culture. This article argues to the contrary that it is immigration policy that departs from an earlier consensus on British values. The article looks at the disagreement within the British elite over the measures adopted to deter asylum-seekers and argues that, in their effect on individual liberty and universal welfare provision, these measures indicate that a significant part of the political class has abandoned the post-war political consensus over what constituted British identity. Not only is the disagreement over the key values that make up British identity located at the heart of the establishment, rather than between native and immigrant, but it is the official deterrence of immigration which most clearly expresses the lack of consensus.